1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to liveliness monitoring and more particularly to a system and method for generically monitoring liveliness across a plurality of different entities and/or applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business resiliency is a key need for enterprise applications. Business resiliency entails a continuous monitoring of the liveliness of applications, taking appropriate corrective steps, e.g. restarting an application, or migrating the application over to a backup site to ensure continued operation.
Business applications may be monitored for liveliness by running a heartbeat. In the heartbeat mechanism, a monitor, usually located at a management site in the network, periodically sends a dummy request to the application. If the application responds correctly, then the application is considered operational. If the application does not respond correctly, the application is considered to have failed and corrective action is taken.
When status of several applications needs to be monitored, an application monitor needs to be written for each type of application. While application monitors exist for some of the most widely used applications, creating an application monitor for several hundred types of applications that are used today is not practical.
Another complexity associated with current state of the art is that some applications are difficult to monitor for liveliness using remote monitors. As an example, with the current state of the art, a liveliness monitor for a trading application would create fake trades on the system to check for its liveliness. However, fake trades can cause side-effects, or trigger thresholds for other actions that may not be caused in the absence of the fake trades.